Initially, the scam announcement was published on 1 February 2022, then the Cognisa Capital team contacted us again & tried to remedy the situation. To cooperate with them, we deleted our previous announcement but 2 weeks passed, nothing happened.
Meanwhile, Cognisa Capital team have been contacting to other projects that in turn contacted CryptoWar team to get information about the case. So far, we can conclude that this case is no longer an open case, but indeed a scam case. Let’s check it out!
The announcement blog post has 2 parts
Original blog post on Feb 1st, 2022
Update Conversation between Tri, Vinay, and Kapur in LinkedIn:
Original Blog Post on Feb 1st, 2022
CryptoWar xBlade has just been scammed and taken 795,455 xBlade (~0.8M) from our treasury and sold into the open market for an approximately of $23,424 BUSD. Even though we are investigating this issue to identify exactly who is the party behind the scam. It is a high chance that it is Cognisa Capital Ltd itself or Wang Tseng, Cognisa’s Head of Operation, who might have gone rouge and scam both of CryptoWar xBlade and Cognisa Capital.
The purpose of this writing is to:
Explain to our community on what happens on Jan 31st 2022 incident when an approximately of 0.8M xBlade get sold onto the open market.
Warn crypto community about risks from dealing with scammers. In this case, it is either Cognisa Capital or Wang Tseng.
Share with crypto community about what we learned through the incident.
What happened:
On Jan 31st, just before Tet Holidays in Vietnam for Lunar New Year 2022, there is 800,000 xBlade (almost 1.34% of xBlade’s Circulating Supply) got sold into the open market, briefly moves the price from 0.0430 to 0.0250 (-42%) before bouncing back to at time of writing is 0.0362 (-14%).
These sales order come from wallet: 0x5Da0aDab435AFd967527C96caC42afDb8C019c55 (BSC Scan Link)
This is contractually an institutional grade custodian wallet from Fireblocks for Cognisa Capital Ltd for its agreement to purchase xBlade token according to this Purchase Agreement between Cognisa Capital Ltd and CryptoWar xBlade: Purchase Agreement - Google Drive Link Share (Annex B). Cognisa agrees to purchase ~8M xBlade from CryptoWar for a total of $350,000 USD. The detail of the transaction can be checked in the Purchase Agreement on Section 5.3. We started the agreement by transferring ~0.8M xBlade to Cognisa’s custodian wallet. It is noted that by enter the Agreement, Cognisa is bound to lock-up term according to Section 6.1, where Cognisa can only sell 15% of the purchased token per quarter. Also according to Section 6.2, before selling, Cognisa needs to send one week notice to our team.
However, right after the transfer is complete, we notice a series of large sales order happens on the open market from the noted above custodian wallet. This is clearly a violation of the Purchase Agreement.
We immediately contact Wang Tseng, Head of Operations for Cognisa and our main Cognisa’s contact through Telegram. It comes to our attention that he tried to erase all of our previous communication and block us:
It is noted that Wang only erase 1-on-1 communication with Tri, xBlade Co-CEO, he still have trace from our group communication when Wang first reached out to us on Dec 18th:
This is Wang Tseng’s detail contact (Wang just removed his avatar and exited from the group communication):
We also notice to Cognisa’s official email (ir@cognisacapital.com) about the sales incident and we do receive a response that Cognisa is aware of the situation and they think the Fireblocks’ custodian wallet address is compromised:
This is our full email correspondence between Cognisa Capital and CryptoWar xBlade throughout the deal: Cognisa and CryptoWar Full Email Correspondence - Google Drive Share. Everyone can look into our email correspondence to see the development of the deal between us, from NDA (“Non-Disclosure Agreement”) initiating to negotiation on the deal size.
It is still an open question to see if it is indeed Cognisa is truly behind this as an organization or it is Wang just goes rouge by himself. We will give Cognisa benefit of the doubt as of for now and see how the situation unfolds.
Cognisa Background Check
It is important to note that we are fully aware crypto market is extremely dangerous. We are scammed before, hacked before (also in the magnitude of about $20K in our other DeFi token: XBN back in Sep 2021). As as people who are active in the market, we receive scam’s proposals and introductions everyday. Thus we treat every party we deal with great attention toward risk mitigation.
It appears to us that Cognisa (https://cognisacapital.com/) a legitimate party and is verified through various other platforms and parties on the market.
This is Cognisa’s team:
And this is their investment porftolio:
Cognisa also has a clean reputation on Google:
The fund is also active on reputable platforms such as CrunchBase, PitchBook, Money Stack, Swift Institute, etc, with the email that we correspond with is registered on CrunchBase:
This is Cognisa’s track record of investing:
In which the deal with Celer Network is covered by Coin98:
This is Cognisa’s linkedin page https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognisa-capital/:
In which during the due diligence process, Tri have video phone call with Wang Tseng and talked directly with Vinay Chowdhury, the Managing Partner:
So we have reasons to believe Cognisa is legitimate partner and that’s why we engaged into the conversation on investing opportunity.
Where to go from here
First, we will continue to open our communication with Cognisa official email address. The official communication acknowledge they received our token and should Cognisa Capital is a legit entity, they need to continue to proceed with Section 5.4 to transfer us $350,000 USDC to our ETH address on Annex C. We will then complete the transfer of the remaining 7M xBlade to Cognisa new, custodian locked, appointed BEP-20 address to complete the Purchase Agreement.
Second, we will reach out to other people in Cognisa Capital to initiate conversation toward remedy of the situation.
Third, we will do our best to warn Crypto communities all over the world who we know to beware of Cognisa Capital until this situation is resolved. So that noone else is running into the same issues we are facing.
Forth, we will contact all parties that Cognisa has dealing relationships with: investees, communities, platforms, and other market participants to inform about the situation we are facing. So that they, too, can mitigate the reputational risks when they deal with or have Cognisa on their platform.
Fifth, this is still a pending and developing case, so we will continue to update about the progress so everyone can follow and see how the situation is resolved.
Finally, this will serve as our lessons. We are fully responsible for dealing with a bad party and let this hurt our project. We will learn from it and make CryptoWar xBlade stronger and smarter in the future.
Sincerely,
On behalf of CryptoWar Team,
Co-CEOs: James Le and Tri Ton
P.S.: We are open to communicate about this matter with the public. Please contact us through email at: tri@cryptowar.network. Twitter at: @tri2singularity. Telegram at: @tri_at_singularity.
Update Conversation between Tri, Vinay, and Kapur in LinkedIn:
At first it seems Vinay and Kapur seems to sincerely want to remedy the situation:
However it’s just their time buying tactics so that they can buy more time to scam other projects. I have been approached by other entrepreneurs and we all figures out Cognisa is still actively contacting other teams and try to scam other people before the spread of my article:
Anyway — Till now more than 2 weeks have passed and both Vinay and Kapur are no longer responded to my message. I guess if it’s so hard for a VC fund to return the scammed money that is conducted by one of their employees and then failed to move forward with the Purchase Agreement then it’s safe to say that the fund has no reputation whatsoever.
It might also be the case that these scammers use other people pictures. I saw Wang Tseng face (not sure if it’s his real name, probably not). So I can confirm Wang’s face.
I’m pretty sure these scammers will continue to scam other people out with a new VC names and new team with new faces. At least through these article, they can’t do with the Cognisa name anymore.
Be safe out there my crypto fellowers,
Tri
Austin, TX — 2022 Feb 21st
Appendix - Related Links:
https://cognisacapital.com/
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cognisa-capital
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cognisa-capital/recent_investments
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/karthik-patel
https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognisa-capital/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinay-chowdhury-15b7b9219/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthik-patel302/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kapur-premji-b67377218/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-aoki-185a4b21a/
https://tracxn.com/d/venture-capital/cognisa-capital/SDBuwROJKSJ3dKnX4hocYpspRsOoUBX3EWIWlTKo5xk
https://www.swfinstitute.org/profile/6036bd04c593a41502c49c85
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/investor/472180-87